Heather Fleming

“Kelley? Kelley, come in,” Irons snapped. “Damn it, Kelley!”

“Do you see her on any of the cameras?” Tobias asked the guard in the security office. He started walking toward the end of the hallway as fast as he could without attracting suspicion.

“Negative,” came the reply.

“Why the hell not?” Irons demanded. “Look harder!”

“I’m running our mass recognition program right now,” the guard told them. “It’s checking all our cameras for her.”

“How long is that going to take?” Irons wanted to know.

“Maybe three minutes, four minutes max.”

“Well, while that’s running, bring up the last piece of footage where you can see her and follow her through the frames manually,” Tobias ordered. “It’ll probably be faster. By the way, I’m leaving my post and heading to the lobby, Irons.”

“I can’t condone letting my agents leave their postings just because one of our number is AWOL,” Irons said, though his voice was heavy with reluctance. “We’re still in the middle of an operation.”

“And I’m still not an agent,” Tobias reminded him. “I’m a professional investigator, and I’m going to the lobby.”

“Hey! Tobias!”

Tobias groaned as he realized Leon had spotted him trying to make his getaway.

“Where are you going?” Leon demanded, jogging up to him.

“Away,” Tobias said flippantly. He opened the door to the stairwell and tried to shut it in Leon’s face before the kid could follow him in.

“You know something,” Leon accused.

“I know a lot of things.”

“But you know something about the murderer,” Leon said. “I can see it in your eyes. You were never good at hiding anything.”

Tobias glared at him and moved closer to the railing. “Agent Kelley just went missing.”

“One of your OCD friends?”

“An agent from the OCU,” Tobias confirmed. “They don’t have a visual of her in the security office and we’ve lost contact with her. She was posted in the lobby.”

“And you’re going there now?” Leon asked. “Dude, you do realize that we’re on the fourteenth floor, right? Why not take the elevator?”

“Because that will take too freaking long,” Tobias snapped. He vaulted over the railing without another word to the annoying teen. Gravity took hold immediately and he plummeted, headfirst, toward the ground floor.

He half expected to hear a few exclamations as he fell, maybe even a scream as some unfortunate woman saw him falling to what would have been his death if he’d been human, but the stairwell was deserted. Apparently everyone else had enough spare time to use the elevator. Tobias couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret about that as he flipped forward and landed in a perfectly balanced crouch, just like the hero of a high adrenaline action movie.

Being a gargoyle definitely has its advantages, he thought ruefully, as he hurried forward and out into the lobby. “Do you have a visual on Kelley yet?” he asked into his mic.

“Not yet. Our program still hasn’t turned up a match on our real time cameras.”

“Have you at least found some footage of her from earlier this evening?” Tobias demanded. “Preferably not too much earlier, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.”

“No – yes. Got it. Footage of her from ten minutes ago, at her post in the lobby.”

“Fast forward it and track her from camera to camera,” Irons ordered. “I want to know where my subordinate it, and I want to know now.”

“It’s going to take some time. There are ten different speeds to slow our videos down, but only one for fast forwarding. We’re usually going over footage in slow motion to catch cheaters and con artists.”

“Just do it as fast as you can.” Tobias picked up his pace as he reached the lobby and cast his gaze around. He didn’t really expect to see Kelley, so he wasn’t surprised when she was nowhere in sight. Waiting for the security guys to find something was difficult. He was usually a fairly patient guy, but when someone was in danger he’d never been able to sit still.

“Our body mass recognition program just finished running. No matches turned up on any of the cameras in real time.”

“So . . . she’s not in the casino anymore?” Irons asked.

“She could be in one of the rooms for guests. We have cameras covering all the hallways, the gaming floors, the auditoriums, offices, and all other public areas and recreational facilities. Dressing rooms and the guests’ personal rooms aren’t covered.”

“Dressing rooms,” Tobias muttered as something occurred to him. He spoke into his mic again. “Do backstage areas count as dressing rooms?” he asked. “That was why there wasn’t any coverage of the stage magician’s murder?”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“I’m checking there,” Tobias told them. “Kelley wouldn’t have left the casino without reporting to Irons, and she’s not dumb enough to follow some random person or a suspect into a room. So either our killer knocked her out and abducted her – which is unlikely since she was in a lobby full of people – or she followed a suspect somewhere that she thought was relatively safe and got caught off guard.”

“Um . . . sir?” asked the security guard.

“What?”

“Weren’t you just on the fourteenth floor? How did you get to the lobby so fast?”

Tobias turned his scorn up a notch and responded. “You know, not all of us are sitting around doing nothing, genius. You could try hurrying too.”

“I told you, our equipment only has one fast forward speed.”

Tobias didn’t bother responding to the weak excuse as he made his way toward the auditorium that had been used by the late Ovid Metamorphoses. “Aren’t there supposed to be security guards in this hall?” he asked, as he realized what was missing.

“Negative. We finally got it cleared to clean up the crime scene. No need to guard it anymore.”

“Great. Plenty of clean floor to paint a new pentagram on,” Tobias muttered. He picked up his pace, since there didn’t seem to be anyone around who would remember his unnatural speed. Of course, it would show up on camera, just like his swan dive off the stairs, but he was counting on security not reviewing those particular pieces of footage since they weren’t that important in the scheme of things, and since the Morpho’s guards seemed more than slightly incompetent.

The hallway was little more than a blur in Tobias’ peripheral vision as he sprinted toward the auditorium. The door was locked, but locks meant very little to gargoyles. The flimsy metal gave way with one good push and the door flew open so hard that it slammed into the wall and probably left a dent.

“Okay,” the security drone said, “I’ve got Kelley talking with someone whose face is obscured, but it looks like she recognizes him. “Now they’re walking across the lobby. They’re heading down the same hallway as you are, Investigator Smithson. You were right –”

Tobias yanked his earpiece out as he leapt up onto the stage. The last thing he needed was an idiot in his head while he was dealing with a psychopath. The tangy, metallic scent of blood reached his nose, right before he ran into the wings. For a moment Tobias was afraid that he was too late.

“Don’t move, or I’ll cut her throat!” a familiar voice barked out, and though he knew it was crazy, Tobias was relieved by the threat.

Though Kelley was pale, and unconscious, and had a blade pressed against her neck, for someone to issue a threat like that, it meant she was still alive.

Tobias held up his hands to show he had no weapon drawn and met the gaze of the fake blood mage whose antics had been giving him a headache for half a week now. “Orpheus,” he said slowly, in his best talking-to-crazy-people voice, “you don’t want to do that.”